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Boost Converter with Battery Management for Energy Harvesting

Thursday, 01 December 2011

The bq25504 from Texas Instruments (Dallas, TX) is an integrated energy harvesting nanopower management solution for ultra low power applications. The boost converter is designed to efficiently acquire and manage the microwatts to miliwatts of power generated from a variety of DC sources like photovoltaic or thermal electric generators.

The bq25504 implements a highly efficient boost converter/charger targeted toward products and systems, such as wireless sensor networks (WSN) which have stringent power and operational demands. The design of the bq25504 starts with a DC-DC boost converter/charger that requires only microwatts of power to begin operating.

Once started, the boost converter/charger can effectively extract power from low voltage output harvesters such as thermoelectric generators or single or dual cell solar panels. Energy can be stored to rechargeable Li-ion batteries, thin-film batteries, or capacitors. Applications also include industrial and environmental monitoring.

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